Blizzard studios has announced that over eight million people world wide have active World of Warcraft accounts, are in the middle of their trial month, or have accessed World of Warcraft in the past 30 days. This translates to roughly 2 million subscribers in North America, 1.5 million in Europe, and 3.5 million in China. The North American figures show that statistically, 1 in every 167 people owns a World of Warcraft account.

Guild Wars (1st) for me too. I tried WoW and it was OK for me, didn't play for too long. But for $15 a month, I'm not going to pay. All I pay for is $50 a year for Xbox Live. That's like a little over $4 a month for Xbox Live, not bad.

But even then, I haven't played Guild War ever since it came out, I just started to play it recently again. But never WoW! The TimeCards cost more than the game itself.

Speaking of Xbox Live, here's a nifty feature of Vista: you can connect to your Xbox Live account (I wish I could report it as news, but the news was presented as a video the register hosted on youtube).

I didnt say playing online games or even relaxing were bad, for god sake i play FFXI.. I was more referring to those who spend all of their free time on games such as warcraft, and don't socialise in real life... Leaving the house and going outside is important too

recreation and relaxation time is an important aspect to being a healthy human being.

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I couldn't agree with you more. However, one thing bothers me: how our definition of recreation has changed :shadedshu .... since like 80% of the people in the US are overweight, I'd guess what's most important for being a "healthy human being" is less of this type of "recreation".

Dont' get me wrong, I love gaming, but not any more than snowboarding, swimming, fishing, hiking, running, biking, etc.

To me, gaming is relaxation and recreation is something else entirely.